You can read a review by Adam Rabinowitz (July 2011) here

A web only publication by Alison Babeu with good coverage of the Stoa and the Digital Classicist. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The author provides a summative and recent overview of the use of digital technologies in classical studies, focusing on classical Greece, Rome, and the ancient Middle and Near East, and generally on the period up to about 600 AD. The report explores what projects exist and how they are used, examines the infrastructure that currently exists to support digital classics as a discipline, and investigates larger humanities cyberinfrastructure projects and existing tools or services that might be repurposed for the digital classics.
(Council on Library and Information Resources)

PDF Download of Complete Report (2.6 MB file)

Mireille Corbier, director of L’Année épigraphique (Paris, corbier@msh-paris.fr), writes to announce that L’Année épigraphique 2008 (containing 1,770 entries and 960 pages, including 210 pages of index) was published in August, 2011, and is now available. Orders should be sent to Presses Universitaires de France at revues@puf.com.

From Marco Büchler:

The Munich DigitiZation Center (MDZ) of the Bavarian State Library invites you to Munich on Tuesday 11 October and Wednesday 12 October, 2011, for two conferences under the shared title “Historische Dokumente auf dem Weg zum digitalen Volltext – Turning Historical Documents into Digital Full Texts”.

Starting from different viewpoints, both events will focus on using OCR to create digital full texts. You can attend either event separately, or both together.

Please note: both conferences are German-speaking only!

October 11th – Results of OCR Research: IMPACT Demo Day

Jointly organised by the Munich DigitiZation Center of the Bavarian State Library and the Austrian National Library, this Demo Day will present research results and tools from the EU-funded IMPACT Project (IMProving ACcess to Text). It will focus on the challenges involved in creating searchable full text from historical documents, and show the tools and solutions created by IMPACT to resolve these challenges. It will also detail how project outputs will be made available once the project ends (December 2011). The event is open to anyone, but is mainly aimed at representatives from libraries, museums and archives.

October 12th – Insights from Practical Experience: OCR, Full Texts and Forms of Presentation

Digitisation projects can’t just present digital images anymore. User expectations are increasing steadily, and mobile devices and other technological forms of interaction bring their own challenges with them.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and searchable full text are therefore becoming more important. This has consequences for the entire project workflow – from its initial scoping and the choice of hardware, to the presentation of the results online. All of these challenges will be discussed at the conference.

The day will focus on the results of a number of full-text digitisation projects, detailing the particular issues presented by different types of source material. OCR software solutions will be compared, along with a number of post-capture processing tools and techniques, including crowdsourcing to improve OCR.

“Insights from Practical Experience: OCR, Full Texts and Forms of Presentation” is free of charge, thanks to our sponsors: Abbyy Europe, ARPA Data, Image Access, Treventus Mechatronics and Zeutschel.

For more information about the programme and registration, please visit::

http://www.muenchener-digitalisierungszentrum.de/~lza/impact/index.html?c=info&l=en

The deadline for registration is September 25th. Please remember, the events will be German-speaking only.

Contact details:

Munich DigitiZation Center (MDZ) Digital Library
Bavarian State Library
Fedor Bochow / Mark-Oliver Fischer
Ludwigstrasse16
80539 Munich
Germany

mdz[at]bsb-muenchen.de

Tel. +49 (0) 89 28638 2295
oder +49 (0) 89 28638 2890
Fax +49 (0) 89 28638 2672

http://www.muenchener-digitalisierungszentrum.de

http://www.bsb-muenchen.de

TILE is cool kits, hope you try it soon. I really love it

“”the reason society should value a strong Arts and Humanities culture is not because of any measurable “value” in economic terms”"

Great observation indeed.

software development

Those who have been waiting impatiently for the first stable release of the Text Image Linking Environment (TILE) toolkit need wait no longer: the full program can be downloaded from: <http://mith.umd.edu/tile/>. From that site:

The Text-Image Linking Environment (TILE) is a web-based tool for creating and editing image-based electronic editions and digital archives of humanities texts.

TILE features tools for importing and exporting transcript lines and images of text, an image markup tool, a semi-automated line recognizer that tags regions of text within an image, and plugin architecture to extend the functionality of the software.

I haven’t tried TILE out for myself yet, but I’m looking forward to doing so.

I am an attorney and doctoral student in Philosophy at Texas A&M. I have found this website to be an immensely helpful resource in preparing my dissertation on Athenian law and government and I will be recommending it to my students. Although I never met Dr. Scaife, I hope those of you who knew and loved him (and there are obviously many who did) to know that his work and contributions continue despite his tragic early passing.

EpiDoc Training Workshop
5-8 September 2011
Institute of Classical Studies, Senate House, London

An EpiDoc training workshop will be offered by the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, and the Institute of Classical Studies in September this year. The workshop is free of charge and open to all, but spaces are limited and registration as soon as possible is essential.

This workshop is an introduction to the use of EpiDoc, an XML schema for the encoding and publication of inscriptions, papyri and other documentary Classical texts. Participants will study the use of EpiDoc markup to record the distinctions expressed by the Leiden Conventions and traditional critical editions, and some of the issues in translating between EpiDoc and the major epigraphic and papyrological databases. They will also be given hands-on experience in the use of the Papyrological Editor tool implemented by the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri, which facilitates the authoring of EpiDoc XML via a ‘tags-free’ interface.

The course is targeted at scholars of epigraphy and papyrology (from advanced graduate students to professors) with an interest and willingness to learn some of the hands-on technical aspects necessary to run a digital project. Knowledge of Greek and/or Latin, the Leiden Conventions and the distinctions expressed by them, and the kinds of data that need to be recorded by philologists and ancient historians, will be assumed. No particular technical expertise is required.

Places on the EpiDoc training week are limited so if you are interested in attending the workshop or have any questions, please contact charlotte.tupman@kcl.ac.uk and gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk as soon as possible with a brief statement of qualifications and interest.

International Workshop on Digital Tools in Papyrology, Vienna.

July 18-23, 2011

This workshop, organized jointly by the Austrian National Library, the Austrian Academy of Science and Vienna University, will provide an introduction to the most important digital tools in papyrology. The program will offer a mixture of classes (in English), in which the students will get an overview of the manifold electronic resources in the field, and training sessions on the new editing platform for DDbDP, HGV, and APIS.

The workshop will also include visits to the Papyrus Collection and the Papyrus Museum of the Austrian National Library. The main teachers will be James Cowey (Universität Heidelberg), Mark Depauw (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), Sandra Hodecek (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek), Thomas Kruse (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften), Bernhard Palme (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek/Universität Wien), Lucian Reinfandt (Universität Wien), Joshua D. Sosin (Duke University), Johannes Thomann (Universität Zürich).

The workshop will begin on Monday, 18th July with registration in the morning and courses in the afternoon, and will end on Friday, 22nd July in the evening. On Saturday, 23rd July, morning there will be a guided tour to the Ephesos Museum.

There is no fee for the course, but 125 Euros have to be charged for accommodation in a university Hall of Residence. The number of participants is restricted to 20.

Advanced students with an interest in papyrology and solid knowledge of Ancient Greek and English are invited to participate, whether they have already experience in the subject or not.

Applications, including a curriculum vitae, should be sent before July 12 to Bernhard Palme <bernhard.palme@univie.ac.at>.

This workshop, organized jointly by the Austrian National Library, the Austrian Academy of Science and Vienna University, will provide an introduction to the most important digital tools in papyrology. The program will offer a mixture of classes (in English), in which the students will get an overview of the manifold electronic resources in the field, and training sessions on the new editing platform for DDbDP, HGV, and APIS. 

The workshop will also include visits to the Papyrus Collection and the Papyrus Museum of the Austrian National Library. The main teachers will be James Cowey (Universität Heidelberg), Mark Depauw (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), Sandra Hodecek (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek), Thomas Kruse (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften), Bernhard Palme (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek/Universität Wien), Lucian Reinfandt (Universität Wien), Joshua D. Sosin (Duke University), Johannes Thomann (Universität Zürich). 

The workshop will begin on Monday, 18th July with registration in the morning and courses in the afternoon, and will end on Friday, 22nd July in the evening. On Saturday, 23rd July, morning there will be a guided tour to the Ephesos Museum. 

There is no fee for the course, but 125 Euros have to be charged for accommodation in a university Hall of Residence. The number of participants is restricted to 20. Advanced students with an interest in papyrology and solid knowledge of Ancient Greek and English are invited to participate, whether they have already experience in the subject or not. 

Applications, including a curriculum vitae, should be sent before July 12 to

Bernhard Palme
bernhard.palme@univie.ac.at

Saw this job listing publicised on Antiquist and Humanist and copying it here.

Research Associate at King’s College London, Centre for e-Research

The Centre for e-Research is seeking a Research Associate with strong technical and software development skills to work on e-research projects at the Centre. These projects may result in case studies, proofs of concept and pilots as well as in software for operational service, so the post offers an exciting opportunity to contribute both to the development of the digital and research infrastructure at King’s and its collaborators, and to more exploratory development of innovative ideas solutions using cutting edge approaches. The post-holder will be expected to publish the results of research undertaken in relevant journals. Some current and past projects may be found at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/iss/cerch/projects/.

Approximately 75% of the post-holder’s work (on average over the 2 years of the appointment) will be dedicated to the SAWS (Sharing Ancient Wisdoms) project, an EU-funded international collaboration that is exploring ways of exploiting the digital environment for creating, publishing and interacting with selected digital collections of manuscripts and texts, specifically Greek and Arabic “wisdom literature”. These anthologies of wise or useful sayings were widely circulated throughout antiquity and the middle ages, and they raise particular challenges at a technical and information modelling level due to the complex network of interrelationships among them and among their component parts. The SAWS project requires an imaginative research associate capable of researching, devising and developing innovative methodologies and tools for creating these complex resources, for expressing relationships between them, and for publishing, visualising and exploring them. The remaining 25% will be spent on other projects at the Centre, depending on ongoing requirements and the interests of the appointee.

The candidate will preferably have an education in information science or computer science, or a humanities degree with a strong technical component. Due to the exploratory nature of the work, the role will require problem-solving ability and a high degree of initiative, as well as flexibility and a keenness to learn. Knowledge of Java, web development technologies (e.g. XML, Django, Ajax) and web service technologies is essential. Experience of linked data/semantic web technologies (e.g. RDF, OWL), and of other programming languages (e.g. Python, Ruby), would be an advantage.

This is a full-time position, initially for a period of 24 months. Salary for the position will be at an appropriate point of Grade 6, currently £33,193 to £39,185 per annum (inclusive of a £2,323 London allowance). Benefits include a contributory final salary pension scheme, subsidised gym membership and 27 days of annual leave, 4 college closure days, plus public holidays.

For more details and an application pack please see http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/pertra/vacancy/external/pers_detail.php?jobindex=10378. Alternatively, please email strand-recruitment[@]kcl.ac.uk. All correspondence should clearly state the job title and reference number G6/QLJ/408/11-JT. For an informal discussion of the post please contact Mark Hedges on mark.hedges[@]kcl.ac.uk, or 020 7848 1970.

The closing date is: 12 July 2011

The programme for the summer 2011 Institute of Classical Studies digital seminars has been released.

Fridays at 16:30 in Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU

June 3: Kathryn Piquette and Charles Crowther (Oxford), Developing a Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) System for Inscription Documentation in Museum Collections and the Field: Case studies on ancient Egyptian and Classical material (Room 37)

June 10: David Scott and Mike Jackson (Edinburgh University), Supporting Productive Queries for Research (SPQR): Aggregating Classical Datasets with Linked Data (Room 37)

June 17: Charlotte Roueché and Charlotte Tupman (King’s College London), Sharing Ancient Wisdoms: developing structures for charting textual transfer (Room 37)

June 24: Alessandro Vatri (Oxford University), HdtDep: a treebank and search engine for Greek word order study (Court Room)

July 1: Agiatis Benardou (Digital Curation Unit, R.C. “Athena”), Classical Studies facing digital research infrastructures: From practice to requirements (Court Room)

July 8: Timothy Hill (New York University), Semantics and Semantic Constructs in Cultural Comparison: The Case of Late Antiquity (Court Room)

July 15: Elton Barker (Open University) and Leif Isaksen (Southampton), Mine the GAP: Finding ancient places in the Google Books corpus (Court Room)

July 22: Sandra Blakely (Emory), Modeling the mysteries: GIS technology, network models, and the cult of the Great Gods of Samothrace (Court Room)

July 29: Marco Büchler (Leipzig), Bringing Modern Spell Checking Approaches to Ancient Texts: Automatized Suggestions for Incomplete Words (Room 37)

August 5: Daniel Pett (British Museum), The Portable Antiquities Scheme: a tool for studying the Ancient landscape of England and Wales (Room 37)

August 12: Valentina Asciutti and Stuart Dunn (King’s College London), Digital diasporas: remaking cultural heritage in cyberspace (Room 37)

ALL WELCOME

The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.

For more information please contact Gabriel.Bodard@kcl.ac.uk, Stuart.Dunn@kcl.ac.uk or S.Mahony@ucl.ac.uk. The seminars will be podcast shortly after each event; follow the RSS feed.

The Digital Classicist community are presenting two panels at the coming 2011 Classical Association Annual Conference (UK).

The full programme is available from the conference website.

The 2011 Classical Association Annual Conference will be hosted by Durham University. The conference involves around 50 panels with a distinguished array of international and national speakers, and is attended by several hundred delegates. The conference will run from the evening of Friday 15th April until lunch on Monday 18th April.

The two Digital Classicist panels are:
Ancient Space, Linked Data and Digital Research (chair: Gabriel Bodard, King’s College London)
Teaching and Publication of Classics in the Internet Age (chair: Simon Mahony, University College London).

In addition Durham Classics and Ancient History are hosting a Digital Classicist Training Day on Friday April 15. There will be a morning session on Generic Web Tools, and an afternoon one introducing participants to the Papyrological Editor. Note that attendance at the training day needs to be booked separately.

From Michael Satlow at Brown University. Please direct all questions to him.

WORKSHOP CALL FOR PAPERS
FEBRUARY 13-14, 2012
BROWN UNIVERSITY

The Program in Judaic Studies in collaboration with the Brown University Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship is pleased to announce plans for a two-day workshop devoted to investigating the ways in which the digital humanities has or can change the study of religion in antiquity. The workshop will take place on February 13-14, 2012, at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

We invite proposals for papers and presentations that explore the intersection of ancient religion and the digital humanities. We are particularly interested in presentations of projects that have the potential to open up new questions and avenues of research. Can digital tools not only allow us to do our work faster and more thoroughly but also enable entirely new kinds of research? How might different digital data (e.g., textual, geographic, and material culture) be used together most productively? The workshop will concentrate primarily on research rather than directly on pedagogy or scholarly communication. One session will be devoted to “nuts and bolts” issues of funding and starting a digital project.

The focus of the workshop will be on the religions of West Asia and the Mediterranean basin through the early Islamic period. Proposals relating to other regions, however, will also be considered.

More and updated information can be found at: http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Judaic_Studies/AncientReligionModernTechnologyWorkshop.html

Please submit proposals of up to 300 words by October 31, 2011, to Michael Satlow (Michael_Satlow@Brown.edu).

On March 29th, 2011, the main server for www.stoa.org suffered a hardware failure. Unfortunately, this led to an extended period of downtime for sites and projects hosted on the Stoa. We have now set up a temporary server, and are working to restore sites and services to it from tape backup, while we also look into a long-term solution for replacing the original server. Please bear with us while we work to restore the site, and thank you for your patience.

Registration open for Triennial Conference, University of Cambridge, 25-28 July 2011

Hosted by the Faculty of Classics, the Celebration of Classics will see a remarkable line up of international scholars brought together in a novel format for such an event. There will, of course, be some very distinguished plenary lecturers, and there will also be two outreach evenings with well-known figures from the media and literary world. But the centre of the event is a set of seminars where leading classicists will be presenting their cutting edge work in a seminar format with extensive opportunities for discussion (each paper will have at least 45 minutes for comment and questions). Each day has only two such seminar slots, leaving plenty of time for debate as well as meeting old and new friends. We are hoping that you will want to come to Cambridge and participate in this event.

For more information about the conference please go to http://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/faculty/seminars_conferences/triennial_conference/.

Professor Stephen Oakley

Chair, Organising Committee

This looks like a very promising workshop.

(To register to attend this workshop, please visit http://pelagios.eventbrite.com)

The Pelagios workshop is an open forum for discussing the issues associated with and the infrastructure required for developing methods of linking open data (LOD), specifically geodata. There will be a specific emphasis on places in the ancient world, but the practices discussed should be equally applicable to contemporary named locations. The Pelagios project will also make available a proposal for a lightweight methodology prior to the event in order to focus discussion and elicit critique.

The one-day event will have 3 sessions dedicated to:
1) Issues of referencing ancient and contemporary places online
2) Lightweight ontology approaches
3) Methods for generating, publishing and consuming compliant data

Each session will consist of several short (15 min) papers followed by half an hour of open discussion. The event is FREE to all but places are LIMITED so participants are advised to register early. This is likely to be of interest to anyone working with digital humanities resources with a geospatial component.

Preliminary Timetable
10:30-1:00 Session 1: Issues
2:00-3:30 Session 2: Ontology
4:00-5:30 Session 3: Methods

Confirmed Speakers:

Johan Alhlfeldt (University of Lund) Regnum Francorum online
Ceri Binding (University of Glamorgan) Semantic Technologies Enhancing
Links and Linked data for Archaeological Resources
Gianluca Correndo (University of Southampton) EnAKTing
Claire Grover (University of Edinburgh) Edinburgh Geoparser
Eetu Mäkelä (University of Aalto) CultureSampo
Adam Rabinowitz (University of Texas at Austin) GeoDia
Sebastian Rahtz (University of Oxford) CLAROS
Sven Schade (European Commission)
Monika Solanki (University of Leicester) Tracing Networks
Humphrey Southall (University of Portsmouth) Great Britain Historical
Geographical Information System
Jeni Tennision (Data.gov.uk)

Pelagios Partners also attending are:

Mathieu d’Aquin (KMi, The Open University) LUCERO
Greg Crane (Tufts University) Perseus
Reinhard Foertsch (University of Cologne) Arachne
Sean Gillies (Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU) Pleiades
Mark Hedges, Gabriel Bodard (KCL) SPQR
Rainer Simon (DME, Austrian Institute of Technology) EuropeanaConnect
Elton Barker (The Open University) Google Ancient Places
Leif Isaksen (The University of Southampton) Google Ancient Places

Over at e-pigraphia, we learn about a seminar on “Epigraphy, society and culture in ancient Rome.” It is organized by the Institut Català d’Arqueologia Clàssica and will be held 2-4 March 2011.

ISMAR 2011: Call for Participation
Tenth IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality
Oct. 26 – 29, 2011, Basel, Switzerland
http://www.ismar11.org

The fields of Mixed Reality (MR) and Augmented Reality (AR) seek to interactively combine real and virtual objects and environments in 3D. The basic paradigm enables fascinating new types of user interfaces, and is beginning to show significant impact on industry and society. The field is highly interdisciplinary, and MR/AR concepts are applicable to a wide range of applications.

This year we are proud to present the 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2011). The symposium will be held on Oct 26–29, 2011 at Congress Center in Basel, Switzerland. We invite you all to participate in this great event for the exchange of new ideas in this exciting field! ISMAR now invites contributions in two programs: the Science & Technology (S&T) program and a complementary Arts, Media and Humanities (AMH) program.

The 2011 ISMAR Arts, Media and Humanities chairs invite artists, designers, architects, urbanists, and scholars to explore the potential of Mixed and Augmented Reality within their respective fields. We welcome artifacts, musings, probings, discourses, and insights to be presented at ISMAR 2011 in the form of papers, posters, art exhibits and performances, panels, workshops, demos, and tutorials.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, case studies, deployments, prototypes, and evaluations of Mixed and Augmented Reality in:

• art,media art, performing arts,
• architecture and urban design,cultural heritage,
• design research,
• game design,
• product design and toys,
• social media,
• transhumanism,
• and advertising and marketing.

Important Deadlines

Paper and Poster Abstracts :    May 11
Paper and Poster Submission :    May 18
Workshop Proposals : June 3
Tutorial Proposals : June 3
S&T Demonstrations : August 15
Art Exhibits: June 3
Tracking Competition: August 15

For further information, please visit the conference website: http://www.ismar11.org

Over at the Sito Italiano di Epigrafia Greca (SITEG), Alice Bencivenni reports on an EpiDoc/SoSOL training workshop held at the Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, 10-14 January 2011.

This is the greatest thing since digitization began. Great work and congratulations to the Perseus project for their vision and imagination (not to mention the incredibly hard work). I noticed some very minor errors in one of the Plutarch dialogues. is there a way to report those?

Dates: 25 May – 1 July 2011
Location: University of Roma Tor Vergata
More information: http://sites.tufts.edu/latiumvetus/

From Monica Berti: